Family Business is an exhibition space initiated by Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni on February 2012. Family Business is a guest house – a place where friends, enemies, people admired and respected are invited to present the works of artists they support and projects they believe in. It is a free time-share: a space made available to people who have something interesting to say; a way to get to know new families and friends. Family Business is a non-for-profit space open to experimentation and irreverent exhibition formats powered by the Center Of Curatorial Studies at Bard College. A guest + a host = a ghost. Nadja Argyropoulou is the Family Business guest (or ghost) curator. Family Business was until recently operating in New York, USA, and has hosted a multitude of exhibitions, projects, concerts, parties and events. Succumbing to some kind of poetic justice, Family Business disappeared from the space on 21st street and 10th avenue, in Chelsea, a little after inviting and proudly presenting «The School of Death», (organized by Cabinet and Simon Critchley, 7- 18 May 2013).

And now Family Business is being conjured in Paris, France, at the powerful call of Palais de Tokyo. There are plans afoot to spread a full, viral presence in the Palais de Tokyo’s labyrinthine corridors. Family Business will even have a room to call its own. A room? Yes—in the form of a weird outhouse-home (a cross between a basement and an attic). As for February 13th, 2014 this queer space will mark Family Business‘s presence, and act as a transmitter, an indicator, a shelter, a vessel, a skin, a (back)stage or perhaps even a 4-D drawing. This hybrid home space, conceived and designed by Family member, architect Dakis Joannou, could be the shadow twin of a found object; e.g. of an unfinished, unauthorised, home in a Greek neighborhood. It is a basement with the ‘potential’ of a first floor; It features an internal staircase which leads to this open, not yet fully constructed floor, while offering a dog’s eye view to the main family seating room; it is a home in the making and on the move; the prospect of a family dwelling, rather than a completed thing. This recontextualized ‘object trouvé’ corresponds to the business of Family Business: hospitality and the exploration of symbiotic relationships, the celebration of «the democracy of misunderstandings» (to quote Cattelan), which always starts with families. Family Business will thus act as a kind of a benevolent virus, crossing or coexisting with the scheduled Palais de Tokyo’s exhibitions and events. It will be shape shifting (parts may be added or taken away, colors, textures will change).

In this space-place-problem Family Business, with guest curator Nadja Argyropoulou, will explore contemporary concerns and age-old anxieties under the title «The Age of Practices». This exploration is about life, people and practices. Family Business will unfold a research into the bleeding edges of disciplines and the shifting that has been taking place in creative processes and their contexts; «The Age of Practices» will point to open, new and neglected, or ‘out of sync’ formats which suggest that creativity is currently being communicated and altered at the same time, that it is highly idiosyncratic and yet shaped by the social sphere. Artists, scientists, academics, storytellers, bloggers, travellers, writers, people in the applied arts, film, music, dance and fashion, individuals and collectives will be invited to practice, to anticipate, to be curious and attentive, to act on experimental ideas and views, to have fun and make a change.

«The Age of Practices» will be shaped as it will be practiced and will be communicating (if perhaps rather erratically) its news. Two of its structural events can be announced hereand more will follow: «The Order of the Third Bird» will create an installation, a situation and a series of actions in the Family Business home. Members of the Order will visit on both a scheduled and unscheduled basis to activate the installation and engage in a silent practice of the Order’s ritual protocol. The seminar «Quelle actualité pour la « critique institutionnelle aujourd’hui ?» and its three organisers Katia Schneller, Vanessa Theodoropoulou and Tristan Tremeau, will be displaced from the INHA in Palais de Tokyo, for a practice on « pseudo-institutions » in the art world, with Gregory Sholette as a guest-practitioner. As much more will be coming, stay close and stay tuned! as Walter Benjamin put it, «I have nothing to say; only show».

Curator: Nadja Argyropoulou

Graphic design: Yannis Kurudis
Program research and web administration: Malvina Panagiotidi
Family Business is powered by the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College
Space fabrication: Studio Metaplasi